The Hindu : Gujral urges media to build faith

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Feb 10, 2003

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Gujral urges media to build faith

By Our Staff Reporter

NEW DELHI FEB. 9. The former Prime Minister, Inder Kumar Gujral, today called upon the media to revive its social relationship and build faith among the people about its own credibility as well as that of the system in which it lives and thrives.

``Otherwise, both the media and the system of which it is a part tend to lose,'' he said, addressing the valedictory session of the two-day conference on `Media and Right to Development' held here to coincide with the 40th anniversary celebrations of the Press Institute of India.

Pointing out that the riots that took place in Gujarat last year were an acid test for the media, he said it had come out with flying colours and stood by the secular values of the country. "The most lively debates in the post-riot scenario were built by the electronic media,'' he said, pointing out that the political system in the country was not yet reconciled to its liberation.

Mr. Gujral said the media's social relationship had seen a sharp decline at a time when technology had gone up considerably. Recalling his own association with newspapers and journalism, he gave the example of how as a young boy, he was exposed to community newspaper reading in Jhelum which shaped his infantile mind. Again, during his college days, the newspaper that Nehru used to bring out from Lucknow was the beginning of his education and trained his thinking.

Mr. Gujral also revealed that as president of the New Delhi Municipal Committee, he and his wife brought out a weekly newspaper during the 1962 Sino-Indian war titled Seemarakshan, an endeavour which he said got him the post of Minister for Information and Broadcasting in the Indira Gandhi Cabinet. The Emergency, he said, did a lot of good to the media. "Once a stage comes when media ceases to be believed, it loses its sense of purpose.''

Sharing Mr. Gujral's sense of optimism, veteran journalist George Verghese, however, said media's interest in social processes had diminished over the years but its emphasis on events or sound bytes had increased. "Though the media is market-driven, it is also true that half of India is outside its ambit. So, what we have is an information-rich society and an information-starved one. This gap needs to be filled.''

Arguing that the Indian language media was now finally coming into its own, Mr. Verghese hoped that a time would come when the grassroots media would influence the national media and set the agenda.

Wolfgang Moellers, regional representative of the Konrad Adenaur Stiftung and a representative of the Council of Asia Pacific Press Institutes, hoped that the regional press institutes in South and South-East Asia would have more such interactions in future. "The media is more than ever confronted with challenges which are hard to be conquered alone. It demands constant dialogue.'' Foreign editors, who took part in the valedictory session, felt that the media must address itself to the question of ethics and develop some sort of a code for accurate and fair reporting. While Alen Garcia from the Philippines said that advocacy journalism with emphasis on accurate and fair reporting was the need of the hour, Kanak Mani Dikshit of the South Asian Himal favoured "more localised evolution of real media that responds to the market place and yet retains its social conscience''.

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